[Hitch]

Originally Posted by yucca

It is a high price to pay when the text has colored words with no understandable (to the user) reason. And it does not increase usability. Rather the opposite. The words are not links, so showing them as if they were is misleading and confusing.

Then wouldn't the simpler answer just be to add the words to the Index editor, and build your concordance/index from there? You may not want every instance of the occurrence indicated, but it completely solves the linking issue. The paragraph containing the relevant word gets marked with an index id--no links or indicators thereof. You'd want to add it to the index editor as you went through, instead of using the "Mark for Index" functionality.

Then, if you want to remove some instances, simply remove them from the index page in html. Is it a tad clunky? Yes, if you have numerous instances that you don't really want marked or included in the index, but it does solve the underscore-color issue and allows you to create a linked-from index in Sigil without the reader confusion, or by having to do it by hand.

This actually works the same way (concordance-like) that most word-processors work; you indicate a list of terms, the word-processor finds all instances, and you build it last. The other method also works like most word-processors--even if you can't see it in the WYSIWYG, the x-ref marking is certainly there.

FWIW, for anyone who comes along after, reading this thread, regexing the target a id's to spans works fine, and the book functions properly, and doesn't have any marking in ADE or iBooks. You may wish to consider doing the index editor-method when you have a single file, which means all your id's are sequential, but for very heavily-indexed books, you may prefer that each chapter restarts numbering, (which is what it does with each XHTML/HTML file, so you get links that include the filename and the id, e.g., "Chapter_0006.xhtml#sigil_index_id_1" as the a href link to.

In hypertext, such things are normally not indicated at all. Maybe they should (and you can do that in CSS nowadays with :target, though I’m afraid e-book readers won’t support it), but definitely not in a misleading manner that shows something as a link when it is not.

Agreed, but the alternative, obviously, is to build it by hand. It still seems far simpler to me to simply complete the index and then regex the entries, which you could create a clip for and do in mere minutes. As we've all learned that user_none is not going to be making any further major changes to Sigil--and we may need a new maintainer--this is likely to be your best solution. It's certainly going to be your fastest. I've tried a number of alternative solutions, but none of them eliminate the underscoring issue, at least, not without making it more work than it would be just to create the index by hand.

Of course. The question is whether Sigil can be improved so that such clumsy fixes are not needed. This would just be a matter of changing the name of the tags generated, from “a” to “span”, when generating index markers (which are supposed to be link destinations, not links).

See my comment above.

Changing the styling of all links would be a wrong way to fix the problem that some non-links look like links. Of course links need to be different from normal text.

I was asking--not suggesting. Some books have links; some don't. However, if changing the styling of the a elements won't solve the problem in any event, then it's a moot point, right? I agree it would be the "wrong" fix, but using "wrong" fixes to deal with various retailers that don't necessarily follow the standards is something that we've all had to deal with, when making books for commercial purposes.

Hitch